Life in the Rehab

So Tim was home from the hospital now for several months.  Pretty good for a guy that for all intent and purpose shouldn't have survived.  He was talking, although not too good, but clearer than before.  He could stand and they were trying to get him to walk a few steps.  He was starting to feel like he was making progress.  But progress has its downfall, Tim had another blood clot in his leg.  When he left the hospital in May, they removed the filter that would catch any clots that might break loose and discontinued his blood thinners.  Now he had another blood clot exactly in the same place in his leg that he had initially.  An overnight stay in the hospital on Lovanox injections and a new regime on blood thinners fixed that problem.  He would have to remain on the blood thinners for the rest of his life now.  Such is the reality of such a catastrophic injury. 

Tim continued with life at the rehab.  It was so difficult for him and me.  I was back to work as much as I could work.  Every morning I would take him to day rehab, settle him in there and then go to work.  By 3:00 pm I would leave work to go pick him up.  Tim would never drive again, so I knew this was my fate.  Where ever he needed to go, I took him.  The Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago is a huge conglomerate of facilities.  There is the main hospital in downtown Chicago and many out patient facilities city and suburb wide.  We have been to several.  Certain doctors have their specialty and we needed to go to where they were located.  

This routine continued until January of 2007.  At this point, Tim was suffering so much pain in his leg, it almost became unbearable for him.  Any progress that he had been making was coming to a halt.  Physical therapy became almost impossible.  After a visit to his orthopedic surgeon in February, it was decided that he would need to go back and have surgery to fuse his ankle.  His stint at the day rehab was coming to an end.  Which actually made him very happy as he absolutely hated going there. (I thought it was a good thing that he was there trying to get better.  He thought I was taking him there just so I could go to work.  Such is the thought process of someone who has suffered a traumatic brain injury.  Sometimes it gets a little skewed.)  Although, after all the time he spent there, I was actually very upset because they told me that he was as good as he was going to get, he probably would never walk again and not to get my hopes up of him getting any better.  So it was just a fine send off.  Tim happy to leave and me, totally weepy eyed.

However, this was the point that my husband woke up once again!  This time he felt like he had a bit more control over what was going to happen with him.  (A bit of a learning curve for me...I was making the decisions for him from the time he was admitted into the hospital to the time he came home.  He was coming around now and he wanted to have input into what was going to happen to him.)  So, he went in for the surgery on his ankle.  They fused it, put a cast on it and he needed to stay off of it for eight weeks.  OK...piece of cake!  Eight weeks past, cast came off and now he could step on it.  Miraculously, half of the pain was gone!   My husband found his determination once again. So, this time with a plan in place to make a shoe with a built up heal to make up for the discrepancy in the length of his leg and to accommodate the angle his foot was now in due to the ankle fusion, back to rehab he went.  The first shoe did not turn out as planned, so we tried again.  I took Tim to a New Balance store to find him a comfortable gym shoe.  When we found the one he liked, we had the heal of the shoe built up.  A lot of hit and miss with this one, but it is the same shoe that he continues to wear to this day.  When one wears out, we just have new ones made up!  This time rehab was a bit more successful.  By the time we finished this stint, Tim was able to walk a few steps with a walker.  His doctor then decided a few steps were good, but he would need gait training.  This pleased my husband as now that he could walk a few steps with a walker, he wanted to be able to walk more steps but using a cane.  So he continued at this RIC facility from June through November of 2007.  In December of 2007, I took Tim for an evaluation at a rehab facility closer to our home near Northwest Community Hospital.  This is the facility that made the difference in our lives.